How to Make Games Without Any Artwork

When making games you need to worry about many different things which can make it look intimidating at first:

Game development: programming the game logic.

Game assets: images, artwork, sound, animations.

Game content: levels, story.

There is an easy way to take one of the three out of the equation for when you are just starting, which is to use plain rectangles as artwork. In this manner, you can work on the game mechanics right away, without having to spend money or time in making the artwork. Moreover, using rectangles at first gives you a better idea of your artwork requirements.

Using rectangles is s quick way to focus on the game itself and post-pone the game asset creation process for when things are more clear.

I always did this in an intuitive way, but I saw it for the first time explained (along with many other great tips to get started) in this amazing article by Christer Kaitila.

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Pablo Farias Navarro

Pablo is an educator, developer and entrepreneur. Founder of Zenva, Pablo has published over 30 online courses that teach game, app and web development. Pablo has also created educational content for companies such as Amazon and Intel.
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thanks Pablo, this is sound advice! Nothing kills progress faster than a sense of an overwhelming task ahead of you… for those of us that are “artistically challenged”, producing game artwork is just such an overwhelming task 🙂